Goldman floods crisis commission with documents

A government commission investigating the 2008 financial crisis has served a subpoena on Goldman Sachs Group Inc. after the bank flooded the panel with 2.5 billion pages of digitized records.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission had asked Goldman to provide documents and grant interviews in connection with the panel's probe.

In response, the Wall Street firm produced 5 terabytes of records, with each terabyte containing 500 million pages of digitized records, FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides said Monday.

FCIC Vice Chairman Bill Thomas said Goldman, knowing the panel's limited resources, had sent commission staff hunting for a needle in a haystack. "We expect them to provide us with the needle," Thomas said.

Goldman spokesman Samuel Robinson said in a statement that "we have been and continue to be committed to providing the FCIC with the information they have requested."

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman in April for civil fraud in connection with the structuring and sale of a $1-billion collateralized debt obligation. The FCIC has until December to finish the probe of Goldman Sachs and other companies and report findings to Congress.

Meanwhile, respondents to a Bloomberg survey said Goldman Sachs is being "legitimately scrutinized" by regulators.

In a global quarterly poll of 1,001 investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers, 69 percent of respondents outside the United States found the SEC suit to be reasonable, compared with 48 percent of people polled in the United States. The June 2-3 poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.- Reuters